Skin Game (The Dresden Files, #15)(77)

We were in Marcus’s Prius (“It’s a totally Alchemist thing to drive,” he’d assured us) and drove straight up the driveway to a checkpoint manned by a guy in a booth. He checked the fake Alchemist IDs Marcus had had made for us and then waved us through. This was all according to plan. Marcus had explained that a gate guard wouldn’t electronically match our IDs to anything in their database. That was going to come when we actually walked in the building.

“You seriously cannot imagine the déjà vu I’m feeling now,” Eddie remarked, once we’d parked in the lot. It had a handful of other sensible, fuel-efficient vehicles. “This is weirdly similar to when Rose, Lissa, and I broke out Victor Dashkov. It’s kind of unsettling.”

“The exception being that he was a hardened criminal who deserved his fate,” I said. “What we’re doing now is on the side of justice, rescuing those in need.”

“Oh, I know,” he said. “I’m just thinking how that escapade wasn’t without its hitches, and we only broke out one person—not a dozen.”

“It almost makes it easier,” said Trey cheerfully. “I mean, it’s all or nothing. You don’t have to rely on the same subtlety you would getting out just one person. We’re breaking this place open.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Eddie said.

The front lobby of the alleged desert research facility certainly looked impressive and scientific. All the architecture was glass and metal, with framed pictures of sandy landscapes that were supposedly key to the place’s function. One glass door led off to the left, to a wing where Marcus’s intel had told us the Alchemists who worked on site lived. A young woman sat at the front desk, with a more sinister and unmarked door behind her that we’d been told should be the one entrance into the re-education lair. She looked up at our entrance, startled.

“My goodness,” she said. “I didn’t even see you walking in on the security cameras.”

“Sorry about that,” I said, oozing spirit-induced charisma. “Hope we didn’t startle you.” One of Marcus’s merry men had been out on the grounds early and found a way to get the exterior cameras to loop on themselves, thus hiding everyone’s approach. This was good for me, since my spirit disguise wouldn’t hold up on camera, and good for Marcus, whose posse wasn’t even attempting subterfuge.

“No, not at all.” The girl smiled at us, showing me my illusion was holding up. “What can I do for you?”

“We’re here to see Grace Sheridan,” I said, flashing my ID. Eddie and Trey did the same. Getting that Sheridan person’s first name had been another gem gleaned from Duncan.

The receptionist’s eyebrows knit as she took our IDs to scan. “I wasn’t told of any appointment. Let me call her.”

Her murmured phone conversation was about what we’d expected, as was her surprise when she scanned our IDs and her computer told her we didn’t exist.

“Our department’s a bit—how shall I put this—clandestine,” explained Trey. “There’s no record of us because we generally don’t like to advertise what it is we investigate. However, we understand there’s been a resurgence of it here, and that Miss Sheridan’s been at the center of the case.”

The receptionist relayed this enigmatic message through the phone and hung up a few moments later. “She’ll see you. Right through this door, please.”

I stepped through, not sure what to expect. From the stories, barbed wire and chains on the walls wouldn’t have surprised me. The Alchemists were still keeping it “business casual” on the ground floor, however, as the room we entered looked very much in line with the lobby’s style—with one exception.

Six men stood guard in the room, ranged strategically around two doors: an elevator and a stairwell. The men wore suits and had golden lilies on their cheeks and were among the biggest and bulkiest I’d ever seen among the Alchemists. Their HR department must’ve searched pretty extensively to find the beefiest specimens in their gene pool. Most intimidating of all, however, was that each man visibly had a gun—a real gun that could kill, not the sleek little tranquilizing kind that Marcus had covertly armed Trey and Eddie with. Marcus had said the fallout would be big enough without us leaving fatalities behind and also worried about innocents getting injured in the fray. (It went without saying that no one had suggested giving me a weapon.)

I kept a cool smile on my face, like it was totally normal for me to see a bunch of armed guys there to keep a group of bedraggled prisoners from escaping or having free thought. The elevator chimed, and a smartly dressed young woman stepped out. She was pretty in the kind of way that said she’d run a dagger through your heart and still keep smiling the whole time. She maintained that smile as we made introductions.

“I’m afraid you’ve caught me off guard here,” she said. She leaned forward a little bit to read my ID tag. “I wasn’t expecting you. I wasn’t even aware there was a Department of Occult and Arcane Transgressions.”

“OAT doesn’t make very many appearances—certainly not many public ones,” I said sternly. “But when a debacle of this magnitude reaches my desk, we have no choice but to intervene.”

“Debacle?” Sheridan asked. “That’s kind of an exaggeration. We have things under control.”